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How the Jewish Vote May Have Helped Decide the UK Election

(Tablet) Yair Rosenberg - The British election on Thursday resulted in a hung parliament with no party garnering a majority but the Conservatives remaining the largest party. A coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (DUP), which won 10 seats, would provide the Conservatives, who won 318 seats, with a governing majority in the 650-member Parliament. A key factor in enabling the Conservatives to cling to power may have been Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's alienation of the Jewish vote. Pre-election polling found that just 13% of British Jews planned to vote for Labour, largely due to concerns about Corbyn, whose associations with anti-Semites rattled many. This ultimately came back to haunt Corbyn, as Labour lost the so-called London "Bagel Belt" - even as the rest of the capital swung Labour - preventing the party from taking enough seats to deny May a coalition majority with the DUP.
2017-06-12 00:00:00
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